I’m Jorge Velez-Juarbe, and this is my story

From an early age I have been interested in science. I was encouraged by my parents who would buy me books as well as science kits. When I was eight years old, I got a Panini sticker album titled “Dinosaurs.” Little by little I collected nearly every single one of the stickers to fill the album. The album was not about dinosaurs alone, but covered history of the Earth and paleontology. One of the stickers featured famed paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews holding dinosaur eggs in the Gobi Desert. I knew then that I wanted to be a vertebrate paleontologist.

However, the lack of a natural history museum in my native Puerto Rico somewhat slowed my desire to learn more. It was years later in college and, incidentally on the day of my 20th birthday, that I had my first close encounter with vertebrate paleontology during a field trip with the Geology Department at the University of Puerto Rico. I was in my second year as an undergrad and this field trip became my first paleontological dig. It was a long day, but in the end we managed to collect a partial skeleton of an ancient sea cow. I was now even more hooked on vertebrate paleontology.

In 2004, I had my first museum experience as a summer intern at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC under the mentorship of Dr. Matthew Carrano. I did a detailed study of the fauna of a fossil site of the Morrison Formation in Wyoming that became my first peer-reviewed publication in 2006. From then on, I continued to collaborate with national and international colleagues; these collaborations resulted in a number of publications before I had even finished my undergraduate degree.

Sooner than I thought, I was back in DC, this time as a PhD student at Howard University with Dr. Daryl Domning, the world’s expert on fossil sea cows. During my graduate studies I also had the opportunity to work on other marine mammals with Dr. Nick Pyenson at the Smithsonian. This resulted in a number of works that are either published or in the process of being published.

Now, as part of PCP-PIRE, I hope to share my expertise on marine mammals as well as on fossil biota of the Caribbean region to the program and learn about other fossil groups from my new colleagues. My research will focus on the fossil marine mammals of Panama. Fieldwork will be aimed at finding additional material that will facilitate the study of their morphology in order to determine their relationships to other marine mammals from the Americas. The taxonomic information will also allow me to look into how physical drivers, such as the presence of the Central American Seaway, affected the biogeography of marine mammals. Aspects of the paleobiology of these marine mammals will be inferred by combining morphological data with other lines of evidence, such as invertebrate and other vertebrate assemblages.